The Cannibal Who Overate, page 9
John read it with a kind of cold fascination. For the first time in the public prints there was the suggestion that his father might have been telling the truth. The News made no bones about its attitude toward Moon. He came out of their account a first-class villain.
The other tabloid carried “Storm Center.” Willard Storm had the inside track on all the other reporters as far as Moon was concerned. He was Moon’s friend. He had spent most of the day with Moon. He described him as gifted, generous, a victim of the envy of less able men, a fighting journalist in his day who had kept more than one world leader toeing the mark in time of crisis. He described Moon as a brave man. He was, Storm said, in spite of the frightening revelation that someone was prepared to pay a fortune to have him killed, going on with the celebration of his birthday. He had never run in the face of danger. He wouldn’t run now. The column ended with a heated warning to the Mayor, the District Attorney, the Police Commissioner and the management of the Beaumont that they were responsible for a “great man’s safety.” You were left to assume that this warning would have the Mayor, the D.A., the Police Commissioner and Pierre Chambrun trembling in their boots.
John put down the papers and finished his coffee, which was cold. Someone else, not too far away, had read the papers and obviously taken note of the fact that there wasn’t even a vague hint or official guess as to who had paid Pamela Prym ten thousand dollars for a job she finally couldn’t do. The News team had asked another question. “With the Prym girl dead, will Aubrey Moon’s enemy try to buy himself a new hatchet man?”
John’s mouth was thin and hard as he tied his tie and put on his suit jacket. He had the answer to that question.
The surprising Pierre Chambrun greeted John with easy warmth. “Been waiting for you, Wills.”
John found himself looking at the tall, red-haired girl who was perched on the edge of Chambrun’s desk. He’d seen her before somewhere.
“Recovered from your bruises?” she asked.
“Bruises?”
“Well, I must say I’m not flattered,” Alison said. “Not many young men bounce off me without remembering it.”
“Oh God! Yesterday morning,” John said. “In the outer office.”
Chambrun was at the sideboard, pouring his inevitable cup of Turkish coffee. “Bad beginning, Wills,” he said. “This is my Public Relations head, Miss Barnwell. I had planned turning you over to her, but I must admit, if you can meet Alison and not remember her—”
“Let the man up!” Alison said. Her smile was as forthright and friendly as any John could remember. “I remember how I was trembling in my boots out there the first time I came to see you, Mr. Chambrun. I wouldn’t have recognized Rock Hudson69 if he’d bumped into me.”
Chambrun came back to his desk, chuckling. “Well, Wills, you walked into a first-class melodrama here yesterday.”
“I suppose all this hurrah is the worst kind of thing for the hotel,” John said, gesturing toward the stack of newspapers on the desk.
Chambrun laughed. “Alison has been distressed by the same thought. It’s a standard cliché in the hotel world that scandal hurts business. I’ve used it myself on occasion. But let me give you the inside truth. Let the world get around that someone has been poisoned by seafood from your kitchen and your dining rooms will be half empty. Let it be whispered that a mink jacket has been stolen out of one of the rooms by a sneak thief and half your transient guests will depart in a body. A tainted shrimp or the theft of something they can replace ten times over will send them stampeding like cattle in a thunder storm. But let some rich manufacturer of arch supporters shoot his mistress to death on the dance floor in your ballroom and you’ll find yourself turning the customers away. A murder, particularly the murder of a celebrity like Moon, would be good for business. I know it and my board of directors knows it, no matter how loud their wails and anguished their hand wringings. Publicly we deplore the possibility. Privately we know it’s like having a Judy Garland or a Danny Kaye70 open in your supper club. Good for business.”
“That about takes the cake for cynicism,” Alison said. She actually sounded shocked.
“What will the hotel do to protect Moon?” John asked.
Chambrun shrugged. “There isn’t much we can do. The place is already swarming with cops. He won’t let ’em in his apartment, but they’re outside in the hall, riding the elevators, wearing out our lobby upholstery. He’s covered like a tent. And all the while he’s beating his chest and telling the world how unafraid he is. As a matter of fact he’s having friends to lunch today in the Grill. We’ll need the cops to keep the place from being mobbed.”
“I was asking Mr. Chambrun just before you came in, Mr. Wills, how I should deal with the press,” Alison said.
“My dear child,” Chambrun said, “there is, I believe, a fashion show to be held in the ballroom this afternoon and evening. There is a reception for the Tunisian Ambassador in the Crystal Room. Tomorrow there is a luncheon for the League of Women Voters. Old Mrs. Haven in Penthouse L is having a reception on Thursday at which she will announce a gift of land for a new dog cemetery in Westchester. Those are all items for the Public Relations department, Alison.”
“You know I’m asking about Moon,” Alison said.
“Moon?” Chambrun said, with elaborate mockery. “Who is Moon? Oh yes, an author who’s giving an expensive birthday party here on Saturday night. Mr. Amato can give you a lot of interesting tidbits for your press releases on the party. And you’ve talked to Moon yourself, haven’t you?”
“I’ve talked to him,” Alison said, so harshly that John stared at her in surprise. “But you know what I’m asking you, Mr. Chambrun. My office is churning with reporters asking for some kind of statement from the hotel about what’s happened and is happening.”
“We have no statement to make about Miss Prym’s death, beyond a small, sympathetic clucking. We have no statement to make about the threat to Moon. That’s for the District Attorney and the police. No statement, Alison.” Chambrun smiled, a thin, sardonic smile. “I wonder what the odds are against the Metropolitan Opera Chorus ever getting to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ on Saturday night? You each want to put up a dollar against my two? I’ll take the bet either way.”
“No matter how much of a heel he is, I don’t find it funny to joke about his chances of surviving,” Alison said.
“You need to develop callouses if you’re going to stay in this business, Alison,” Chambrun said. He gave her an indulgent, fatherly look. But he was serious. “It’s part of our way of life to make a joke about everything. To have feelings about something is to show weakness. Jokes or no jokes, I have feelings. I never knew the Prym girl, but I feel for her. You read what the News dug up?”
Alison nodded.
“No chance ever,” Chambrun said. “Father dead. No good mother. Probably no formal education. She could only live by showing her body on stage, and after each show getting mauled by every stagedoor John on Broadway. Probably decided if she was going to be mauled she might as well get paid for it. ‘Talented body, but with the mind of a small, sentimental child of eight,’ Moon said about her. Now I know Moon, Alison—and I suspect you have some knowledge of him from the way you reacted a while back. What do you suppose he did to that girl? What kind of degradations did he force on her? Whatever they were she hated him enough, and needed to be free of him enough, to take ten thousand dollars from a mysterious benefactor and decide to kill him. She was at the end of her endurance with Moon. But finally she didn’t have the guts to go through with it. A weak girl, you say; a neurotic, disturbed girl. But human—helplessly human. I feel for her. I wish, without having known her, that I could have helped her out of her trouble before it was too late. But Moon?” Chambrun’s lips clamped together for an instant. “This is not a human. His whole life has been built around the sheer pleasure of destroying people, hurting them beyond endurance. Read the papers. Miss Prym isn’t the first one to commit suicide. There was a French diplomat, probably that British actress, an unfortunate army officer named MacIver who was obviously framed by Moon. Those we know about. How many more over a fifty-year span of calculated sadism? Do you honestly think, Alison, that I give a damn what happens to a man like that? So if I joke about whether they’ll get to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ at his party, it’s only to cover up the fact that I secretly hope somebody quietly disembowels him.”
“Amen,” John heard himself mutter.
“You men!” Alison said.
Chambrun grinned. “As the pacifist said just before the hydrogen bomb lit on his chicken coop. Let Moon worry, let him sweat, and if he dies we’ll omit flowers. And I’m not joking. Now Miss Barnwell, take our Mr. Wills out of here and show him how we operate ‘the Playground of the Rich in New York.’”
Alison’s office was a three-room suite just down the hall from Chambrun’s.
“The first thing we do, Johnny, is get ourselves a table in the Grill for luncheon. I wouldn’t want to miss Mr. Moon’s first public appearance, would you?”
John shook his head. Like the bird hypnotized by a snake, he thought. Sooner or later he had to see Moon, face to face.
Alison had been right about the press waiting in her office. They had to push their way through a group of men and women clamoring for some sort of news handout into Alison’s private room and close the door.
“I’d like to turn them loose on our Mr. Chambrun for five minutes,” Alison said. “He might come up with less comical answers on how to deal with them. Sit down, Johnny.” She picked up her phone on the desk. “Jane? Get me Mr. Cardoza in the Grill Room.” She glanced at John. “We’ll see if my feminine charms are better remembered by Mr. Cardoza than by you! He’s the headwaiter in the Grill.—Good morning, Mr. Cardoza? Alison Barnwell here.” She covered the mouthpiece with her hand as Mr. Cardoza spoke at length. “I’m not forgotten!” she said. “Now for the big test.—Mr. Cardoza, I want a table for two for today’s lunch time.—Yes, I know what’s up. Why do you suppose I’d risk my figure eating your extraordinary food?—No, it’s not an order from Mr. Chambrun. It’s a personal request, dear Mr. Cardoza.—Of course, we’ll hang from the chandeliers if necessary.—Bless you, Mr. Cardoza. You’re a lamb.” Alison put down the phone. “Touch and go,” she said. “He’s already overpromised himself. Evidently I still have something on the ball.”
“You’re a very nice girl,” John said.
“How faint can your praise be, Johnny?” She laughed. “I guess we’ve rung all the changes on that gag. But, you see, I noticed you yesterday, which must mean I didn’t want to be forgotten. What, exactly, can I do for you, Johnny, as public relations director of this plush-lined aquarium?”
“I’m not sure,” John said, avoiding her direct stare. “I don’t know enough yet to ask intelligent questions. If I can just tag along with you and see how things work, perhaps in a day or two I’ll know exactly what to ask.”
“Tag along. Mind if I get personal, Johnny?”
“Of course not,” he said, leaving himself wide open.
“I have a nasty kind of mind, Johnny,” she said, and somehow the laughter had faded away from her.
“I know better,” he said.
“I don’t mean nasty-nasty,” she said. “Look, I’ll put my cards on the table with you, Johnny, because I want you to do the same for me. I was married once upon a time to about the nicest guy there ever was. He was killed in a bomb test out in Nevada. For a while I didn’t want to go on living myself. I liked being married. I liked being loved. I knew I wasn’t going to fall in love again, and if I did remarry it wasn’t going to be the same—not the same at all. Well, I finally picked myself up off the floor and went to work. I had no particular training, but I’d been lucky enough to have a good education. I tried being a lady reporter. I guess I was too much of a lady. It worked around into public relations, for a cruise outfit—like yours, I suppose; a dress designer; a movie company; and finally this. This is where the part about my nasty mind comes in. It’s nasty because it remembers odd things. After I first saw you yesterday it remembered something it should have forgotten.”
“Oh?”
“The picture of a young man walking out of the personnel office at International Airport. This young man’s father had been a bomb expert. Because of my association with bombs, perhaps, it stuck. The story that went with the picture stuck—the story about an unhappy man who killed himself after an encounter with Aubrey Moon.”
John drew a deep breath. “You know who I am,” he said.
“Yes, I know, Johnny.” Her smile was gentle. “I thought I ought to tell you if we’re going to spend time together for the next few days. Do you know that when Mr. Chambrun mentioned your father you turned white as a sheet back there in his office? Mr. Chambrun didn’t notice. He was too fascinated by the sound of his own words.”
“You didn’t tell him what you knew?”
“Why should I? As I recall the story you’d legally changed your name. Reminding people that you’d once been John MacIver was what was giving you trouble, wasn’t it?”
“So much trouble.”
“One thing bothers me, Johnny. When you came here to find out about the hotel business you must have known that Aubrey Moon lived here.”
“I knew.”
“Will he recognize you if he sees you?”
“I don’t know.”
“One thing you can count on. Mr. Chambrun won’t kick you out on your ear just because Moon asks him to. Johnny?”
“Yes?”
“Johnny, my nasty mind again. Are you really here to find out about the hotel business, or does it have something to do with Moon?”
His mouth felt dry. It was too late to pretend with her. She’d caught him with his guard completely down.
“That mind of yours is nastily persistent,” he said, trying to smile.
She was silent for a moment. “Would you like to give me a chance to understand your side of it, Johnny?” she asked, quietly.
He sat there, looking down at his hands which were tightly folded in front of him. Nice hands, the Stewart girl had said last night. Almost certainly the Stewart girl had known who he was, too. “No matter what you do I don’t know you from Adam.”
He looked up at Alison and felt a strange ache in his throat. He remembered that same ache when, as a kid, he had fought back tears for some reason. He was aware of a terrible urgency to tell her the whole story, every detail of it. Since the day of his father’s death he’d never been able to say it all to anyone. It had been too painful for his mother to share with him. Not once in twelve years had he been able to explain the deep sense of loss his father’s suicide had brought to him. He’d really had no father. First the war, and then the persecution by Moon which had turned his father into a hopeless, defeated stranger. There had been no one with whom he could share his own defeats. There had been no one to hang on to when he felt his own moral code crumbling. There had been no one to hear him wake from a troubled sleep, crying out wild threats of revenge against Moon. It was boiling up in him now as he looked into Alison Barnwell’s troubled blue eyes.
He moistened his lips. “I came here more than half intending to kill him,” he said. And then it tumbled out of him, the whole grim story. The saga of his father, doomed by Moon’s sadistic hatred; the slow wasting away of his mother; his own unbearable frustrations. Alison never interrupted once in the telling. He believed that what he saw in her face was sympathy—or at least pity.
“It wouldn’t have taken much at any time,” he said. “If I’d found myself standing next to him in a subway station I could have pushed him down on the tracks and felt almost no guilt. I hadn’t come to the point where I could go out hunting for him, but if the chance had come my way I’d have taken it, I think. Then five weeks ago the note came.”
“Note?” It was Alison’s first question.
“Up in my room I have an exact duplicate of the note they found in Pamela Prym’s purse. Except mine is addressed to me.”
“Johnny!”
“The money was there in the Waltham Trust. I—I let it stay there. All the time that I kept telling myself I was a civilized human being who wouldn’t kill another man, even though I hated him, I remembered the money was there. Finally—finally I went and drew it out. I bought some clothes. I got in touch with Tony Vail in London and had him write a note of introduction to Chambrun. I thought—I don’t know what I thought. I’d just scout out the situation. I didn’t have to go through with it. But—I bought a gun. Then, with everything nicely arranged and a week in which to make my decisions, the lid is blown off by the Prym girl’s suicide. There is someone—someone mad as a hatter—determined to end Moon’s career not later than his seventy-fifth birthday party on Saturday. He thought the Prym girl might do it for him. He thinks I may do it for him. He may even have other strings to his bow. He is someone who knows all about me; who obviously knew all about the Prym girl. If he’s crazy enough to carry out this scheme, he’s crazy enough to carry out the threats he made in the note. I will not live through Sunday, he promised me, if I take the money and don’t go through with it.”
“So you went off the rails for a minute,” Alison said, in a practical voice. “You took the money. You’ve spent some of it. But you’re not going through with it. So you go to the police, hand over your copy of the note, and cooperate with them in finding this lunatic.”
“You’re a doll for listening,” he said, fumbling for a cigarette.
“Well, isn’t that what you’re going to do?” she demanded.
“I haven’t thought it out,” he said.
“What’s to think?” She sounded impatient. “My dear Johnny, don’t behave like a character in a bad detective story who doesn’t do the obvious thing to protect himself. So you took money to kill a man, which probably puts you behind some kind of legal eight ball.71 But your story’s real, Johnny. If you go to this Lieutenant Hardy, show him the note, turn over your gun, offer to help—surely they’ll give you some kind of a break.”
